Astro Hacker News - Scientists discover Kelvin-Helmholtz Instability on the surface of the Sun

mturmon |next [-]

This kind of observation is a big deal for solar physics.

It's been believed for decades that these small-scale (~100km and below) turbulent features are critical to understanding how energy dissipates in the Sun. And thus, how sunspots and flares form.

The subject has been very qualitative but is yielding on both observational and simulation fronts. I worked adjacent to this area from the 1990s-2010s, and it had been true that MHD numerical simulations of significant volumes of the Sun (but at a scale fine enough to resolve these features) were not possible. That has obviously changed!

Additionally, it had been that the best solar observatories could not quite resolve these features. In the late 1990s some of the best images came from a couple of observatories in the Canary Islands (e.g., the 1-meter Swedish telescope -- https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4715/). The spatial resolution was perhaps in the ~100km range.

Of course, these are absolutely mind-boggling images. You're looking at a slice of the solar photosphere that has a temperature such that it activates a spectral line around 400nm. By isolating that wavelength, we can see what's happening at that temperature, and thus, sample a slice of the photosphere.

So, that had been the state of affairs. Now DKIST (4m aperture), with the particular instrument highlighted in OP, appears to be at a spatial resolution ~5x finer than the above imagery -- see Fig. 1c in the Nature paper (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10871-3). It appears also (https://dkist.virtualsolar.org/vanNoortfastcam/) to be observing at 740Hz (!) for speckle reconstructions at ~1Hz.

At this scale, vortices of the flow are well-resolved -- where before you just resolved the convective cells but not the turbulent features around them. It's these turbulent features that are transporting energy.

To contextualize with respect to a HN perennial topic: DKIST (commissioned 2021) is funded by NSF, from the same pile of money that once funded Arecibo (up to 2020).

robertlucas |root |parent |next [-]

Thanks a lot for sharing your experience with us.

I worked adjacent to this area from the 1990s-2010s when the topic is solar physics is definitely why this forum is one of the last "places" of the internet.

mturmon |root |parent |next [-]

Sure thing.

Remote sensing of the Sun is different from anything else, because you have so many photons. The idea of binning it down so fine (20x20km, 740Hz, a single nm of spectrum around a band center) is unheard of for any other target.

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BobbyTables2 |root |parent |next |previous [-]

Silly question but how does a 4m aperture focused onto a smaller area not concentrate the heat and melt the instruments?

esikich |root |parent [-]

It's highly filtered, you are only getting a small slice of all of the wavelengths. Only a tiny fraction of all that energy hits the photo collector. I believe the collector is also actively cooled, but I might be wrong there.

perpetuallunch |root |parent |previous [-]

> The subject has been very qualitative

What does this mean?

CGMthrowaway |root |parent [-]

"Qualitative" means that the field had good conceptual theories, but didn't have sufficient observational and computational resolution to determine the detailed numerical values

oxzidized |root |parent [-]

Well put. And to round out the nomenclature for those that are curious, the corollary here is that it can now become much more quantitative.

bluenose69 |next |previous [-]

The Nature paper is open-access at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10871-3 in case folks want to read the details.

inatreecrown2 |next |previous [-]

Some of the images (d,e,f in Fig.1) in the nature article https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10871-3 remind me of fractals.

cf100clunk |next |previous [-]

Don't look directly at them.

doodlebugging |root |parent |next [-]

Just get yourself a pair of these DuckDuckGo Paso Robles and enjoy the view.

https://knockaround.com/products/duckduckgo-paso-robles

eviks |root |parent |previous [-]

You can use a protective glass built into your monitor!

sebastiennight |root |parent [-]

Instructions unclear, I just burned my Retina.

x______________ |next |previous [-]

Not to undermine how cool this is but is there any reason why we are only getting a looped 3 second video?

jdnier |root |parent [-]

Check out the last video on the page. It zooms in and you get a sense of just how much resolution there is.

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nomel |next |previous [-]

More direct link: https://nso.edu/press-release/nsf-inouye-solar-telescope-ena...

tomhow |root |parent [-]

We updated the main link, many thanks!

lucb1e |root |parent [-]

Eyeing that title and given the more more concrete article introduction sentence

> Scientists using the U.S. National Science Foundation Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope have made a major breakthrough in solar physics, discovering Kelvin-Helmholtz Instability on the surface of the Sun — a finding that could help explain explosive solar activity and other solar phenomena.

Perhaps it make sense to unclickbait the title by replacing "a hidden solar process" with "Kelvin-Helmholtz instability"

tomhow |root |parent [-]

OK, we've rewritten the title, thanks!

rootusrootus |next |previous [-]

https://archive.is/YDn6S

shevy-java |next |previous [-]

The Sun impresses me. So much energy to dish out, so little of that is taken by planet Earth yet it helped yield and maintain life. Now what will happen when that energy is taken away ...

perpetuallunch |root |parent |next [-]

Why would the sun’s energy be taken away?

bormaj |root |parent [-]

It's the impending and inevitable heat death of the universe... several billions of years away...

beart |root |parent [-]

I think you're off by about 90 orders of magnitude for the actual heat death

caymanjim |root |parent |next |previous [-]

The sun will destroy the earth long before it stops providing energy.

Razengan |root |parent |previous [-]

We still have our core

There may be rogue planets out there sustaining life far from any star..

apt-apt-apt-apt |root |parent [-]

There is. They had a civilization long ago, but now they're down to a small village and only have a radio that they use once every 1000 years.

I managed to talk to them a few years back on my ham. They asked me to send them energy, I told them we'd need to figure out fusion energy first and that we'd get back to them next millenium.

modeless |previous [-]

I wonder if we will ever discover life inside stars. There's definitely complex stuff going on in there.

ReptileMan |root |parent |next [-]

You need some form of plasma that is stable and able to self organize. Is there any part of the physics where this is possible?

andrewflnr |root |parent [-]

Stuff like a field-reversed configuration comes to mind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-reversed_configuration Conceivably, more complex plasma configurations could exist that are self-stabilizing enough to, you know, exist, but unstable enough to interact with each other in complex ways. Realistically... I doubt it. I'd love to hear from someone who knows about plasma dynamics, but I'd expect their answer to be more pessimistic, not less.

shevy-java |root |parent |previous [-]

You mean inside of a sun or so?

Current life depends heavily not only on RNA/DNA, but also water. I can not see how it is possible to have an information system (such as RNA/DNA) without water possible. Enzymes, even of extremophilic organisms, have a fairly small range where they can work. I think the temperature record is at about 122°C or so as highest temperature. At 150°C, if I recall correctly, ATP has a life cycle of 0.1 seconds or even less than that. Life is very fragile on every level.

In principle one could think of synthetic biology maximizing on all aspects including scenarios not constrained by "classical" life, but even then I can not really imagine how it were based on RNA/DNA without water. One could dispute whether metabolism belongs to life, but even if we were to state that metabolism need not be a defining feature (viruses may not need metabolism on their own, but they are cellular parasites, and in turn energy is required to maintain life, even if it is a dormant life stage such as seeds or what not), I can not imagine a system that could function differently here without a need for water.

If you mean any other solar system in general then it is pretty likely that life is possible on many of them, but logically there would have to be conditions that could yield life, and I think this is quite difficult. For instance, there is no life on Mars and never was, despite NASA trying to milk more money for a "quest" (besides, any such quest is pointless as there is already life on Earth, I fail to see the logic addiction here that more life has to be found "outside"; if the evolution of life is logical, and I believe it is, then it really is irrelevant how often this exists outside of this planet).

If you refer just to stars alone then I do not see how the conditions can yield life. The heat is extreme, it destabilizes almost everything. Even the radiation is deadly. Earth is rather rare here in conditions, see the term Goldilock planets.

modeless |root |parent |next [-]

Obviously not based on DNA/RNA. I think it is pretty lacking in imagination to believe that DNA/RNA in liquid water is the only possible configuration of atoms that could make a self-replicating and evolving organism.

jibal |root |parent [-]

Imagination is great for writing science fiction but it doesn't change the laws of physics that make the sort of organization needed for life impossible. You write "configuration of atoms" but there's no such thing within stars.

colechristensen |root |parent [-]

There is a sort of island of complexity in the parameter space of physics where we exist in a thin film on the surface of a rock orbiting at such a distance of a star of a particular strength.

It is a bit presumptuous to dismiss out of hand that this is the only possible island of complexity in the universe and there are not other sets of parameters with similar entropy-fighting characteristics.

zakki |root |parent |previous [-]

In Islamic teaching it is said that there are 2 other life forms. The first one is Angels, they are created from light. The second one is Jinn, they are created from smokeless fire. Jinn is like human being, they need to drink, eat, have sex, have family,etc.

I don't know how to prove that.